Bernie What The Hell Are You Doing?

By Jacob Weindling | August 26, 2025 | 3:33pm

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Congress Bernie Sanders

Last week, Trump shook down Intel and extracted a ten percent stake from it in a classic protection racket move. This stake will be held by the United States federal government, but that entity is totally controlled by a man who has openly mused two days in a row about being a “dictator,” so you’re completely delusional if you think anyone but Trump controls that stake in Intel. This is state capitalism, similar to Maoism, and anyone who considers themselves a conservative and not a shameless Trump bootlicker should oppose this on ideological grounds. That most of the GOP has happily supported the outline of a policy once proposed by Bernie Sanders just goes to show you how much Republicans let Trump dictate what they think about the world and how little personal agency in their own thoughts and beliefs they really have.

Which brings me to Senator Bernie Sanders, who complimented Trump for this shakedown, claiming that it is what Sanders submitted to Congress three years ago. Independent of whether this is good policy, and it could be in responsible hands, treating whatever Trump does as anything other than a fascist takeover is the height of naivete. And yet, “I am glad the Trump administration is in agreement with the amendment I offered three years ago,” said Bernie Sanders to Reuters.

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He submitted this proposal to Congress alongside Elizabeth Warren as an amendment to the CHIPS Act, who had a much better response. “Donald Trump seems to have stumbled on an idea that I pushed years ago to promote corporate accountability,” said Warren to Reuters. “The president just saying he wants the public to have a stake in a major company isn’t the same as having a real strategy to rein in stock buybacks, onshore jobs, and support long-term economic growth in America.”

That is how you do it, not ‘Donald Trump agrees with me.’ Any rational person should instinctively disagree with anything you say if you say that.

This is not a time for normal politics, and nothing Trump does is done in service of anything other than his immensely fragile ego and his and the GOP’s cultish desire to make him the American Ayatollah. Treating his policy proposals as anything other than the outright corruption they have long proven to be normalizes Trump to a degree he has never earned, and this saga exposes yet again how there is a limit to Bernie Sanders’ politics.

Even though the Democratic Party spent the last decade hysterically telling everyone that Sanders is an unhinged extremist hellbent on taking Hillary Clinton’s divine right to rule in his bid to destroy America, he has long been a Senate institutionalist in the vein of Democrats like Chuck Schumer. Sanders has been opposed to eliminating the filibuster, which effectively makes his entire policy platform impossible to enact, and at the start of the Trump administration, he also pulled a classic braindead Schumer move of trying to reach across the aisle to work with Elon Musk’s DOGE. Bernie has done wonders to advance the cause of socialism in America, but time and time again he exposes how his worldview is partially formed by an institutionalist Beltway strain, and here he is doing it again.

There is little to no appetite in the modern Democratic Party for ‘the GOP makes good points’ pablum anymore. This is a war for the soul of America, and everything the Republican Party does is in service of ridding this country of our democratic system. Trump is far likelier to leverage the government’s stake in Intel for his own ends than to give citizens a return on the grants we have given chip makers in this arms race with China. Anyone trying to find common cause with Republicans is just proving how they are not ready to meet this moment that will determine whether the pluralistic ideals codified in our constitution survive.

The fighters versus folders framing in the Democratic Party makes for some strange bedfellows. I am a proud socialist who thinks we should abolish billionaires and I wrote a complimentary article about a billionaire governor this morning, and now am slamming the man I enthusiastically supported for president in both 2016 and 2020. The rules of traditional politics are dead, and politicians trying to practice them are dramatically counterproductive to this fight to stop America’s descent into full-blown fascism.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries refusing to say any word that hasn’t been focus group tested and declaring that an invasion is a “distraction” is in the same vein as Bernie Sanders saying that Trump enacted a good policy. Both are open appeals to a rotted politics of the past that helped lead us to the collapse of America as we know it, and the net effect of both tracks is that Trump receives a level of legitimacy from Democrats he has not earned. If invading cities with armed, masked agents kidnapping people into unmarked cars is a distraction, then it must not be that big of a deal. If the president shaking down a company and stealing a stake in it is endorsed by a socialist, then it must not be that bad. Bernie is doing his own braindead version of Bipartisan Common-Sense Solutions here, and both he and Jeffries are effectively aiding the Trump administration’s rampant criminality.

Fascist regimes have no good ideas. They don’t do anything for the populace, just acts in service of empowering and enriching the regime and its conspirators. What Bernie and Elizabeth Warren submitted to the Senate is not the same thing as Trump’s power grab, and characterizing it as such is a great way to ensure that people horrified by Trump think that Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have terrible ideas. The only productive position a Democratic politician can take these days is one of universal opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism, and Bernie has lent it enough of his credibility that he has sometimes placed himself closer to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ folders wing of the party than the nascent fighters wing characterized by a diverse array of ideologies from JB Pritzker to Gavin Newsom to Elizabeth Warren.